Welcome to an Uppsala Forum Guest Lecture entitled "External Security Threats and Gender Inequality in Politics" with Visiting Fellow Alice J. Kang, Associate Professor of Political Science and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

The presence of women in office has grown worldwide since the 1970s, but many countries such as South Korea lag behind global trends. In this talk, Associate Professor Kang proposes that external threats, particularly threats to a country’s “homeland”, help explain the exclusion of women and overrepresentation of men in politics. Kang proposes two possible reasons why external threats to territory contribute to gender equality in positions of political power. For one, in contexts of external threat, voters may be particularly discriminatory against female candidates and biased in favor of male ones. Second, external threats may promote higher levels of militarization, which tends to favor the recruitment of male over female candidates for decision-making posts. In a series of cross-national analyses, Kang finds that external territorial threats hinder women’s legislative gains that would otherwise be made in an increasingly favorable international normative environment. Further, Kang finds that women hold lower prestige positions in executive cabinets in countries that face external territorial challenges.